Last Updated: April 2026
Truthfully, have you been here? You’re in the middle of entering a transaction in GP and you click the lookup button to find a customer, vendor, or item. The list pops up but it’s sorted in a way that makes no sense for you. The columns showing aren’t the ones you need, and you end up scrolling or typing partial strings hoping something surfaces. You find what you need eventually, but it took 42 times longer than it should have.
Advanced lookups in Dynamics GP exist specifically to fix this. They let you control what information appears in lookup windows and how it’s organized, so the right data is front and center when you need it. If you’ve never touched the Advanced Lookup setup, you’re working harder than you have to.
What Advanced Lookups Actually Are
When you click a lookup button in Dynamics GP, say on the Customer ID field in a sales transaction, you’re opening a lookup window. By default, GP populates those windows with a predefined set of columns in a predefined order. Advanced lookups let you override those defaults.
Through the Advanced Lookup Setup window (found under Microsoft Dynamics GP > Tools > Setup > System > Advanced Lookups), you can define which fields appear as columns in any supported lookup window. You can set the default sort order, choose which field users search against first, and control how many columns are visible. Each change you make applies to that specific lookup window across the system.
This is different from SmartList. SmartList is for building and running custom reports. Advanced lookups are about what you see when you’re in the middle of data entry and need to pull up a record. The two features are related, but they serve different moments in your workflow.
Setting Up an Advanced Lookup
Open the Advanced Lookup Setup window and you’ll see a list of lookup windows you can configure. Select the one you want to modify: Customers, Vendors, Items, GL Accounts, and many more are available.
From there, you choose which fields to display as columns. The key decision is what your users actually need to see when they’re searching. For a customer lookup, the default shows Customer ID and Customer Name. That works if everyone searches by ID. If your team searches by phone number, city, or contact name, those fields aren’t visible by default, and that’s the problem.
Add the fields that matter for your team’s workflow. Move them into a logical order. Set the default sort field to whatever people search by most often. If your sales team finds customers by company name, make Name the first sort column, not Customer ID.
Watch this short video clip from CAL for step-by-step instructions.
A practical tip: before changing anything, talk to the people who use the lookup regularly. The AP clerk searching for vendors has different habits than the order entry team searching for customers. Advanced lookups can be configured differently for each window, so you don’t have to compromise.
Connecting Advanced Lookups to SmartList Favorites
Next, you’ll want to step up your game and assign a SmartList Designer list as the source for an Advanced Lookup window. That means if you’ve already built a SmartList that shows exactly the customer or vendor data your team needs, you can wire that same view into the lookup window.
The payoff is significant. Instead of maintaining two separate configurations, one for SmartList reporting and one for lookups, you build the data view once, and it works in both places. If your team already has SmartList Favorites set up for the records they use most, connecting those to Advanced Lookups is a natural next step.
Searching Within Lookup Windows
Now that your Advanced Lookup columns are configured, searching gets faster too. Within any lookup window, you can type directly in the search field at the top to filter the list. The search runs against the column you’ve set as the default sort.
Note: Dynamics GP searches from the beginning of the field by default, not anywhere in the string. If you’re searching for a customer named “Springfield Manufacturing” and you type “Manufacturing,” nothing comes up. Type “Spr” and it finds it. This is worth explaining to users when you roll out any lookup changes, because it changes how people type their searches.
If you need to search within a string rather than from the beginning, that’s where SmartList’s Search function is more flexible. For mid-entry lookups, training your team on how GP’s field-start search works saves a lot of confusion.
Using the Lookup Window Effectively
These tips and tricks make Dynamics GP advanced lookups faster regardless of how they’re configured.
Column header sorting. Click any column header in a lookup window to sort by that column. Click again to reverse the sort. If you’re looking for a vendor you know starts with “T,” clicking the Name column header and sorting alphabetically gets you there faster than scrolling.
Resizing columns. You can drag column borders within the lookup window to widen or narrow them. If a field is truncated and you can’t read the full value, drag it wider. These changes don’t persist after you close the window, but they help in the moment.
The Find field. In most lookup windows there’s a “Find” field at the top. Use it in combination with the column sort. Sort by the field you’re searching, then type in Find. GP will jump to the nearest match in the sorted list.
Keeping Lookup Data Clean
Advanced lookups only help as much as your underlying data allows. If your customer list has dozens of inactive customers cluttering the results, even a well-configured lookup window is harder to use than it should be. GP lets you mark customers and vendors as inactive, which typically removes them from lookup lists. Periodic cleanup of inactive records makes every lookup in the system faster and less cluttered.
This is also worth revisiting when people complain that lookups feel slow. A bloated list of records, many of which haven’t been touched in years, adds friction that configuration alone can’t fix.
Advanced Lookups as Part of a Broader GP Setup
Advanced lookups are one of those features that sit in the background doing quiet work once it’s set up. Users don’t think about it because it just works. But getting there takes a little bit of configuration and knowledge of how your team actually searches for records.
If your GP setup hasn’t been tuned since implementation, this is a good place to start. CAL Business Solutions has been working with Dynamics GP customers across manufacturing, distribution, and professional services for decades. If your team is fighting the system to find basic records, that’s a solvable problem. Reach out to our team and we can take a look.
